The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  “Well, yes. I suppose that it might fetch twenty-five hundred dollars at retail, because of the damage. It’s not a perfect copy, and, of course, this particular translation was used by practically every literate person in England for eighty or so years, so there are a lot of them.”

  “Lord! Twenty-five hundred dollars! This is like Antiques Road Show.”

  “Almost. I’m prepared to write you a check for twenty-five hundred right now, which is a good deal more than you’d get from a dealer.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Mr. Mishkin. Could I interest you in some nice Fiesta ware?” We were all smiles now.

  “Not really, but there is another item I’m looking for, mentioned in some old family papers, a kind of old surveying instrument, made of brass…?”

  “Surveying instrument? No, I don’t think so. You mean one of those things with a tripod and a little telescope?”

  “Not necessarily. This would have been portable, maybe a yard or so long, and a few inches across, like a big ruler…”

  “You don’t mean that?” She pointed. Dick Bracegirdle’s invention was hanging above the mantelpiece, softly gleaming, kept and polished by generations of his female descendants, ready for use.

  Or a concoction of the scam artists, I should say. Once again, I was impressed with the intricacy of the plot. Had Miss Evans been involved in some way? Had they actually found a real descendant of Richard Bracegirdle, or had they begun with this old lady and built up the whole fraud around this antique instrument and an old Bible, and invented an ancestor to suit? Even a master of the involved lie such as myself could not help admiring the clockwork detail.

  At Baltimore-Washington Airport, I went into one of those lounges they reserve for the prosperous traveler and called Crosetti in Zurich. I told him what I had just bought and then I used the computer facilities to scan and send off to him via e-mail the cipher from the flyleaf of Bracegirdle’s Bible. He said he would run it through his solution program and get back to me. I had a coffee and some snacks and killed an hour or so, and then he called me back, and not with good news either. The cipher did not solve with the Bible and grille key that had been used for the letters.

  “Why would he have done that?” I asked Crosetti. “He had an unbreakable cipher. Why the change?”

  “I don’t know. Paranoia, maybe? He was dealing with two hostile parties, Dunbarton and Rochester, and both wanted something he had, and both of them had the Bible cipher. Maybe he wanted to hold something back, or maybe he wasn’t thinking too clearly by then.”

  Oh, yes, I sympathized there. “So it’s another grille?”

  “Not necessarily. I think it’s a regular book cipher. I mean it’s a running key based on a text.”

  “What text? The Bible?”

  “I don’t think so. Do you recall all that business in the last ciphered letter when he’s talking with Shakespeare about where to hide the play and he explains how a key works and he says something to the effect that Shakespeare said to use his own words to hide his play?”

  I did, but vaguely. I said, “So we’d have to run through all of Shakespeare’s work to find it? That’ll take forever.”

  “Not really. Remember that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t published in a complete edition until 1623. Bracegirdle wouldn’t have wanted to use a play that might be out in different editions, some of them corrupt. I mean he was in the business-he knew that.”

  “So what then?”

  “Well, fourteen rows of ciphertext. Maybe it’s a sonnet. The sonnets were published in 1609.”

  “So try them.”

  “Yes, boss. By the way, if this is a bust too, you’ll have to go and see Klim at my mom’s.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because he’s the only serious cryptographer I know. If it is a running key and not from a text we already know, then you’ll need to do a much more sophisticated analysis. Not impossible, not with the kind of computer power that he can put together, but not trivial either, maybe a keyspace of two to the fortieth or so. But I can’t do it, and he can. And you’d have my mom there too.”

  “And she’s also a cryptographer?”

  “No, just a real smart woman who does the Sunday Times crossword in twenty minutes or so. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”

  So then up to LaGuardia by plane, alerting Omar en route. He met me and was devastated when I told him about the children, real tears sprung from his eyes, the match of which the dad had not himself shed. Even my servants conspire to abash me, was my ignoble thought as we drove out on the ever-clogged Van Wyck. It was a short drive from the airport, perhaps the only advantage of a residence in Queens. At the little house I immediately saw that all was not as it should be. There was a filthy pickup truck parked in front with one wheel up on the curb, and the front door of the house hung open, although it was a chilly day. I told Omar to drive up the street a bit and to stay in our car with his cell phone at the ready while I took a look around the house. Omar objected, saying that we should both go and him armed, but I refused the offer. I didn’t say it, but it occurred to me that I had risked his life several times in this miserable affair and could not bear to risk it again, if risk there was. If risk there was, I reasoned, it were better that the lesser man should bear it, nor would I have minded the worst happening. And I rather looked forward to the opportunity of handing out some pain.

  Thus I crept down the alley at the side of the house, keeping low and peering into each window in turn. In the living room, nothing. The bathroom window was obscure glass. Ahead lay the tiny backyard, two fig trees wrapped in burlap, a little patch of brown lawn, a dormant flower bed with a concrete statue of the Blessed Virgin in its center. From this yard I could see into the kitchen: and here was a tableau. Mrs. Crosetti and Klim were sitting in chairs at the table and their mouths were covered with tape. There was a large, crop-haired man in the room with them with his back to the window. He seemed to be haranguing them, and in his hand was a large nickel-plated revolver.

  Without thinking I plucked the statue from the earth-it weighed perhaps fifty pounds-raised it over my head and took a little run at the house. The man must have heard something, or perhaps it was Mrs. Crosetti’s eyes widening in shock, because he turned and faced the window and so took the full force of the flying Mary (plus glass fragments) right in the kisser.

  After that the familiar ritual of the police and the slow extraction of information. Mrs. Crosetti was gracious under the circumstances, although she did question my propensity for doing violence in her home, which I thought a little unfair. The man was not dead, I was happy to learn, but would certainly miss the senior prom. His name was Harlan P. Olerud, and he was a security guard from somewhere in Pennsylvania and he was under the impression that Albert Crosetti had absconded with his wife, Carolyn, and he wanted her back. Apparently he had been led to the Queens dwelling via a computer map that young Crosetti had carelessly left on the road near his home while searching for the mysterious Carolyn Rolly. The police found the map in Olerud’s pickup truck, which also held two frightened children. In the ordinary course of events, these would have been handed over to the bureaucracy that cares for parentless kids in New York, but since Mary Peg was involved, events took a different course. She wanted to take care of the tykes until we all figured out what was what with the mysterious C.R., and also I think because of an empty-nest syndrome the size of Montana. I believe I made up a little for my use of force in her home by getting dear Father Paul on the line from London. There is nothing Paul does not know about the child-care bureaucracy in New York; he made some calls, vouched for Mary Peg, made noises-unusual circumstances, police investigation, potential danger, best interests of the child, etc.-and the thing was done, at least temporarily. Board games emerged from the attic, pizza was generated out of basic ingredients, a jolly time was had by all, except that Klim beat me by fifty points at Scrabble, which I thought was a bit much, English being my first language.
/>   Mary Peg came into the living room from putting the children to bed looking remarkably happy (here a pang at memories of Amalie in the same situation, my lost home…) and sat down next to Klim on her sofa. With all the police and kid business this was actually the first time we had been able to manage a quiet talk. I brought them up to date on what I had been doing and showed them the Bible and the Bracegirdle range finder I had purchased in Maryland. Not a word about the whole thing being a scam, of course. I also distributed printouts of the deciphered letters, and while they were reading through them I woke up Crosetti in Zurich and asked him if there were any developments. He said that Paul had told him yesterday that someone had e-mailed Amalie a picture of the kids holding that day’s copy of the New York Times. They were both smiling and seemed perfectly all right, no threatening guys in black masks. I said that seemed odd, and he agreed. “It’s like they’re on a class trip. That doesn’t sound like the Shvanov we know.”

  I admitted it was peculiar, but good news at any rate. Then I told him about Harlan P. Olerud and the two children. He said he’d let Rolly know and I said I’d arrange for a call from the kids and that I’d let him know if we had any luck with the new cipher. He wanted to speak to his mother, and so I turned the phone over to her.

  Klim was fooling with the range finder. “An ingenious device, quite ahead of its time. It will require a new little mirror-here-and then I believe it will work as designed. May I see the cipher from the Bible?”

  I gave it to him and he examined it for a while and then said he would enter the ciphertext into Crosetti’s desktop PC and see what could be made of it. “All Shakespeare’s works are available in digital form, of course, so if the key is from his known work we should get a good hit.”

  “Unless he used lines from the lost play,” said Mary Peg. “That would be a Bracegirdlian thing to do.”

  “In that case,” said Klim, “we will have to use more strenuous methods.” He hefted the Bible, smiled, and walked off.

  Mary Peg bid her son good-bye and said, “That’s awful about your kids. Your wife must be in agony. Shouldn’t you be over there with her?”

  “I should, but she doesn’t want me. She blames me for the whole affair and she’s right. And I have a sense that the kidnapping is not what it seems.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d rather not say just yet. But I’ve been putting some things together and I don’t think that they’re in any immediate danger. In the future, who knows, but not now, provided we can locate this thing.”

  “Oh, it’s perfectly clear where it is.”

  I expressed astonishment. “Yes,” she said, “they tossed it down that well he mentioned, you know the one where Bracegirdle followed Shakespeare and his goon into the forest and they saw the recusant service. That ruined priory…” She shuffled through the printouts and found the page: “Saint Bosa’s Well. Where else would it be? He says they went up to Stratford and the well is just half a day’s ride away.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but where is the well? Bracegirdle said it was a secret even in Shakespeare’s time. It could be under a factory or a housing development.”

  “True. And in that case we’ll have to announce it publicly and turn the whole mess over to the authorities. Which I sometimes think we should have done from day one. But”-here an uncharacteristically wolfish expression appeared on the Map of Ireland-“I sure would like to find that play. So we can only hope that the well is still bubbling away, forgotten for centuries.”

  After that she made more coffee and we drank it with Jameson whiskey in it. We talked about family, I recall, and children, and their joys and discontents. I rather regretted not liking her son and decided that it was an aspect of my craziness and resolved to be more agreeable to him in future. After some time had passed in this desultory fashion, Klim emerged with a glum look.

  “I am sad to say that this ciphertext does not generate plaintext from any writing of William Shakespeare that is recorded by history. This is not deadly for us, because as I believe I have said earlier, we can run guessed probable plaintexts along the ciphertext and see if we get something intelligible and this I have started to do, but I desired to have some of your Irish coffee at this time.”

  This was provided, and I asked him if he had found something intelligible yet.

  “Yes, of course, we start with the commonest words in English and see if the ciphertext gives us, let us say, a the in either direction using a standard tabula recta. Of course Bracegirdle could have used a nonstandard tabula, but he has not before this, so let us suppose he is hurried and wished to stay simple. So we use the computer to query if any three letters of the ciphertext will generate a t-h-e trigram as part of our key, and you see here that we do: both TKM and WLK give us the, and when we run that key back against this ciphertext it gives us ADI and DEG, which fortunately are both trigrams common in English. Similarly running and gives us one hit and the plaintext FAD, which is also a good English trigram. Running be gives two hits, and we get ENDF for the plaintext and also a little bonus, because the first be comes right before that the we have already discovered, and so we know that be the is part of the key text. And so we go on from here. Each little advance gives us more of the plaintext and more of the key text and the two decipherings reinforce each other, which is why the running key based on a book is so weak. For this reason the KGB only used almanacs and trade reports with many tables of numbers, so the entropy is higher. Now the next word we try should be is or of, I believe…”

  “No,” said Mary Peg, “try Jesus.”

  “This is religious advice, my dear?”

  “No, the word. You said you ran the key against the complete works and come up empty?”

  “Yes. Aside from some purely random runs of pseudosense.”

  “But he wrote one thing that’s not in his published works. His epitaph.”

  She ran to a shelf and pulled out Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, and there it was on the first page:

  Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones And cursed be he that moves my bones.

  “On second thought,” she said, “it should be with the archaic spelling. I think it’s in Wood’s book.”

  It was. Klim entered the old spelling into the Vigenère solver and it worked, giving us:

  fromguystowrheadingeduesout

  hseteightysevendegreeseachsyd

  esheliethfourfadomsandfoot

  belowcopyngeintheeastwall

  “This seems plain enough. One stands upon a place called Guy’s Tower and sets Bracegirdle’s instrument so that the zero point in the center is pointing due south by the compass set in it. Then the arms are placed at eighty-seven degrees, and then I suppose one must have a man with a flag walk out, and one looks in the eyepiece until the two images of the flag join and there is your distance and direction. Then when you find this well, one lowers oneself down on a rope with a candle stuck to one’s head with hot grease and there at a depth of…what is a fadom?”

  “A fathom,” said Mary Peg. “Six feet.”

  “Yes,” said Klim, “so at a depth of let us say seven point six meters in the east wall of this supposed well we shall find your play. Or an empty hole. If we knew where this ‘Guys Towr’ was.”

  “It has to be Warwick Castle,” she said confidently. “Bracegirdle wrote that you could see the castle from the ruins of St. Bosa.”

  A moment on the Internet confirmed that there was indeed a Guy’s Tower on Warwick Castle, and on the south side too. I said, “That’ll be an interesting experience. Trying to sight off the top of a major tourist attraction while a man with a flag walks through the suburbs.”

  But Klim’s fingers were already flying on the keys, and in a few minutes the screen showed a view from above the tower battlements of a castle. It appeared to have been taken from about twenty feet up.

  “Very impressive,” I said. “This is a commerci
al satellite picture?”

  “No, it is U.S. military. I have accessed it through an anonymous link but still we cannot stay on it very long.”

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “He’s a spy,” said Mary Peg with something like pride.

  “I am a retired Polish spy, perfectly harmless. But I retain some knowledge of this sort of thing. America has the worst security of any nation, it is well known in those circles, a kind of joke in fact. Now we shall use some tools to drop a smart bomb on Mr. Shakespeare’s play.” More clicking and a red grid appeared over the picture and a palette of drawing tools sprang up along one edge of the screen. He said to Mary Peg, “My dear, if you could just measure that device?”

  “Three feet exactly,” she replied after some manipulation of a tape measure.

  “So…let us see, ninety-one point forty-four centimeters, which we center on the north-south diameter of this tower…so…and we then draw a line from either end at eighty-seven degrees from that base and we generate two lines which intersect…so. As you say, X marks the spot. We need not go up on the tower and bother the tourists. Thank you, United States Air Force satellite-based tactical program.” He pressed a key and the printer growled. I looked at the printout. Due south of the castle and veering off to the west was what looked like a plowed field bordered by copses of trees. The red lines from the tower converged in one of the dark little woods.

  “How accurate do you think this is?” I asked Klim.

  He shrugged. “As accurate as it was in 1611 at any rate. There does not seem to be a car park and lemonade kiosk there, so perhaps your well is still lost.”

  I called Crosetti again and told him what I wanted him to do. It took quite a while. What a lot of cleverness and effort expended on a fraud, how many nice people would be disappointed! A perfect symbol of my life.

  20

  Carolyn Rolly wept for what seemed like a long time after Crosetti told her what had happened to her kids and to Harlan P. Olerud at Crosetti’s mother’s house in Queens, and then she insisted on calling there to talk to them until Crosetti managed to convince her that it was late at night in New York instead of the early morning it was in Zurich. Then his cell phone delivered a call from a man from Osborne Security Services who said that a plane was waiting at a local airport and they said good-bye to Amalie, with whom Carolyn had struck up a surprisingly warm relationship, surprising given the differences in their backgrounds and general approach to life. Perhaps, he thought, it was the commonality of motherhood and the peculiar situation of both sets of children bearing a similar horrible stress. With his usual curious eye, Crosetti watched the two women exchanging embraces. They did not really resemble each other physically, but both presented to the world the same air of solid particularity. He couldn’t imagine anything really changing either of them: Carolyn and Amalie, what you saw was what you got, although Amalie was honesty incarnate and Carolyn lied like a snake. Had Carolyn been blond, he concluded, they might have been two sisters, the good one and the bad.